China will publish "Ayn Rand Series"

Phil,
I asked you those questions so that you can judge for yourself whether what Jason and I wrote are true, e.g., whether Mr. Osborn is not "qualified to discuss this subject" after so many factual errors in his posts? whether his logic is poorly formulated? and whether his post #32 is "a personal rant"?

If you consider that calling a spade a spade is uncivil, then I'm sorry. Truth can be ugly.

Post 41

Thursday, February 22, 2007 - 8:20pm

The Red-Haired Face-Eating Demon (formerly known as Phil Osborn):

The most useful thing about these particular kinds of discussions is that they demonstrate the very point being made. Thanks for your cooperation, Hong! BTW, I'm single.

Regarding Mandarin: I offer to teach Chinese to new non-employees where I work. For free. It doesn't take long at all. "Duay." End of class.

Regarding traditional Chinese culture: does this exclude the all-pervasive superstitions such as feng shui or this nonsense about the "Golden Year of the Pig." I used to think that Spanish fiction contained the height of anti-rational, magical thinking, until I read some modern Chinese stories about traditional Chinese culture, where every tiny life decision from minute to minute is analyzed for a thousand superstitious portents.

One of my friends from when I lived on the East Coast (pre-1976) was Lee Muller, who read "Atlas Shrugged" at my and other people's urging and soon became Chair of the Libertarian Party of South Carolina. His dad, John Muller, was an ultra-hard-core anti-communist who had been one of Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers - the mostly American volunteer figher pilots who fought the Japanese from within China before America entered the war - made famous by the John Wayne movie. John Muller also wrote for the ultra-conservative "Duck Book."

When I learned that he had been a "Flying Tiger," I eagerly questioned him about his views and experiences in China before the communists took over. Note that my only knowledge about China at that point had come from reading the pro-communist "Red Star over China" in high school.

John told me flat out, "The communists were an improvement."

I was astounded, knowing his politics. He then stated by way of explanation that prior to the communist takeover, "China was a graveyard," by which he meant that the worship of ancestors plus the extreme conservatism and hatred of anything new meant that all progress and innovation had come to a complete standstill.

Fast forward about two decades, and I'm listening to Ian Masters on his local in-depth world politics analysis/interview program - "Background Briefing." Masters is interviewing Sydney Rittenburg, the author of "The Man Who Stayed Behind." (A marvelous book, BTW - which I did read from cover to cover.) Rittenburg was with the U.S. Army in China toward the end of WWII. He witnessed such barbarism from the Kou Ming Tang - not to mention the U.S. army itself - that in reactive horor he deserted as the U.S. was pulling out its troups and joined up with Mao's forces, leading to his becoming the chief English propaganda translator for the Beijing government for several decades - minus the 17 years he spent in solitary confinement on two separate occasions for allegedly being a U.S. spy.

After the second imprisonment for nothing in fact but being associated with the wrong faction in Beijing, Rittenburg had had enough and returned with his Chinese wife and family to the U.S., where he became a professor at Kentucky State University, which was where Ian was interviewing him over the phone.

After the interview, I called him and had a long discussion about Chinese culture. I discussed "Thick Black Theory" with him among other subjects related to the endemic corruption and dishonestly in China that I had been reading about and which he had written about in "The Man Who Stayed Behind." The gist is that although he had not read TBT, he pretty much agreed that this was the governing business ethic in China.

Some years later, Ian had another interview with Sydney, and I called him again to see if anything had changed in China - which he kept continuous tabs on, as he and his wife had meanwhile set up a very successful business consulting practice for American firms who wanted to do business on the mainland - and my recollection is that he indicated that things were pretty much the same, although American businesses were gradually becoming wary of doing business there after a number of well-known disasters.

One of the interesting points that is made over and over in "China, Inc." is that Chinese have learned to forget the past. Capitalist sweat shops produce bobbing-head Mao dolls. Nobody wants to talk about the horrors that came before. There is still no discussion of the Tianamen Massacre.

But this is not a communist cultural trait. When Chiang invaded Formosa (Taiwan), the native Formosans objected over having their country simply taken over. It's certainly understandable that when the devil is at your tail, you take whatever escape route is available. However, Chiang's army massacred an estimated 20,000 unarmed Formosan protestors in one incident. Then the Kou Min Tang government denied that it ever happened - until the mid-1990's! !!! When they finally admitted it.

And, speaking of lies, has anyone tried to count all the historical inaccuracies and implicit lies, not to mention racism, woven throughout "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?"

Since it is clear that China is on a roll, economically, mainly due to burning up huge resources of artificially cheap labor, and will soon become perhaps the 2nd superpower, the question is, "what will that mean for the rest of us?" What will it mean to have a purely short-term pragmatic super-state with a history of paranoia, and a positive-feedback internal information system, with thousands of nuclear weapons? (Oh, and I don't mean the U.S. ... this time.) ;)

China desperately needs a rational moral base that people will subscribe to for good, objective reasons. The key here is "objective." Clearly the Communist Party never provided that, and falling back into some kind of faux confucian revival will only be another fad. Maybe it's time for the Anarcho-Objectivists to make their move. Somebody better, and soon.

See this article from Yahoo news today: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070223/ap_on_re_as/asia_cheney

Post 42

Thursday, February 22, 2007 - 8:48pm

> Phil, I've seen you write a million posts similar to the one I wrote above

Jason, I don't want to get into a long exchange. But there is an important distinction here:

1. I don't think I say the equivalent of "you aren't qualified to discuss this subject" - because I don't know that. Or tend to focus on "a disdainful, self righteous manner" unless there is something more specific than that. Or call something "a personal rant" in response to someone who actually makes a series of arguments (and whose post was not insulting or personally venomous). Until someone has ejected himself from civil discussion, I really try very hard to identify where there is **a specific and objective error** even if it involves a criticism of something the person is doing in his posts (e.g., "you're being rationalistic", "you need to read what was already said"). In fact, I am often -very strongly critical- of bad methodology because I think it is a vital area and one should be able to accept that sort of criticism without taking offense. You can criticize a person's -methods- or what he does in his posts without it being unfair or uncivil but it has to be relevant to the topic and not simply a form of contemptuous dismissal without offering proof or content or concretes.

That is what is not good or helpful debate or good, constructive conversation, I would suggest.

2. Even if you could find "a million" (or even a half dozen posts) where I did the same thing, then that would mean I was wrong in that case, not that it's appropriate in this case.

Post 43

Thursday, February 22, 2007 - 9:02pm

"Until someone has ejected himself from civil discussion, I really try very hard to identify where there is **a specific and objective error**"

That is the difference. I'm absolutely SURE that the above poster HAS ejected himself from civil discussion. I was hoping that he would realize this 2 or 3 posts ago, but he just keeps posting rant after rant and so my point is more then proven.

If you would have noticed that instead of noticing the extremely bland rebukes from Hong and myself I don't think YOU and ME would be involved in this very silly and unnecessary exchange. But in any case, I'm not interested in discussing the other Phil with you anymore.

- Jason

Post 44

Thursday, February 22, 2007 - 9:03pm

Just Get More Specific, Please!

Why not deal with the points he's made instead? He is certainly not the only one to make these points about the Confucian culture, about superstition (feng shui) and luck (gambling, fate) as widespread. Or the Objectivist point about the East never having had an Aristotle or an Englightenment.

The Aristotelianism which was injected centuries ago into the Western mind and it's absence in much of the East is a very significant and important issue. (He didn't say it, but I am...and I'm not the first Oist to observe that.)

Otherwise it just seems like bristling because he's "attacking China" or because you don't like his 'tone'.

I do suspect many of his points are overstated. But he's offered a lot of interesting connections. So CONVINCE US, if you have something to say about that...Deal with that in some specificity, instead of dismissive one liners like calling it "illogical" or a "rant" without specifying exactly how...

Post 45

Thursday, February 22, 2007 - 9:30pm

"But he's offered a lot of interesting connections. "

Ok Phil, well you can have a discussion with him about all of his interesting insights :)

- Jason
(Edited by Jason Quintana
on 2/22, 9:31pm)

Post 46

Saturday, February 24, 2007 - 4:05pm

A few thoughts:

One of the more "interesting" (taken both in the sense of the Chinese curse, as well as literally) aspects of working for a traditional Chinese company, as I have for 16 years, is observing the way that information is controlled. When information flows as needed, of course, one inherent effect is the undermining of arbitrary power. Reducing the utility of arbitrary power in a culture - such as the business culture where I work - makes it generally less desireable, of course, while increasing its utility increases its attractiveness.

It is the control of information which is the key element that I have identified as underpinning what otherwise appears to be an insane accumulation of power for power's sake.

Where I work, I have had many, many employees come to me utterly mystified as to why they were never given sufficient information to do their jobs. They and I would have to return to management ten or twenty times just to get the correct job specifications. I might be handed a sheet of paper with a few scrawled notes and illustrations and simply told, "Do this now."

If I or any employee asked for clarification as to "this," then the manager would become furious and contemptuous, as in, "Don't you know your job?!" However, if we did not ask for more instructions, then of course the very strong likilihood would be that we would do something completely irrelevant to the actual job that management had in mind (note: "mind" is assumed here, for purposes of advancing the story). Thus, we would return with something or other and then be castigated for not understanding the instructions which we had never received.

Round and round this would go, so that a job that I could do in 30 minutes blindfolded would often take three days. However, it gave management many, many chances to exercise and demonstrate power.

Meanwhile, when I started there, I noticed that there were no manuals for PageMaker or any of the other software I was expected to use. I was told that they had had a problem with "losing manuals." In fact, however, I soon discovered that the company president was taking them all back to Taiwan in order to pass them on to the pirates. He would boast in his personal correspondence - which I entered and corrected for grammar, etc. - that he could provide his business associates (other manufacturers, etc.) with "very cheap" complete suites of top-line computer software.

Eventually the Software Publishers Association caught up with them, and, according to the General Manager, they "got slammed" with some huge fine. I think that the standard fine during that period was $145,000.00 per violation.

Since blaming the actual participants - the company president and his sons - was impossible, as that would involve them losing power ("face"), instead they pretended that the problem was the employees, and spent several man-weeks of labor to produce an "information sheet" (DIS-information, in reality) which had to be kept posted on the side of every computer.

This information sheet advised employees that any exchange of data between employees had to have explicit prior permission in writing from the company president or general manager in each separate instance. Taken literally, of course, this would have brought the whole company to a standstill, and, no matter how it was interpreted, if anything went wrong, the person who made the interpretation of what the edict meant could be held liable.

Thus, the General Manager strenuously avoided any discussion of the mandate. However, this was no fun, as it left everyone - including me - open to blame at any time. Even if everything we had done for a particular job was perfect, the fact that we had used a file from the net for reference, or asked another employee a technical question could - and likely would - be taken as grounds for an enraged denunciation.

So, I simply pretended to know what the edict actually meant: Clearly, it meant that no computer files could be exchanged between employees, whether over the NOVELL intranet or via "sneaker net" (handing someone a floppy disk). The General Manager siezed upon this "clarification" I created specifically with him in mind and employed it from then on - or at least the next two or three years.

So, I would be working on a catalog in PageMaker. The floating executive assistant would be three feet away typing in all the descriptions and specs for a new product to be included in the very catalog. When he finished, he would print it all out, and then hand me the paper printouts, which I would then retype into PageMaker.

For a while, whenever I saw anyone sending a file over the net of passing a floppy, I would bring their attention to the edict posted on the side of their monitor and inform them that they either had to print everything out and then re-enter it by hand, or get special written permission from management. I had hoped initially that the obvious silliness of the procedure would lead to management revoking the edict or somehow correcting the situation, but that was clearly an error on my part. I estimate that it cost the company several hundred man-hours of completely wasted time. On the plus side, I laughed my head off every day.

However, power was preserved.

This is only one of the 300 or so similar tales from my workplace that I could tell. Since a good proportion of my co-workers have been Chinese, with prior experience working for other Chinese companies, typically in Taiwan, Hong Kong or the mainland, I asked many of them how this company rated, in terms of rational management. Most of them indicated that it was nothing unusual, perhaps a little worse than average.

I've seen equally bad management at American companies, where it usually indicated that the company was about to go bankrupt. However, the profits from the company where I work don't come from being efficient managers of employees - at least not here in the U.S. They come - or so has been reported to me - from using suppliers who in turn use extremely cheap labor in Mainland China or Indonesia, etc. - where they are free to bribe the local officials for monopoly labor access.

Then the product is shipped, ready to go on store shelves here, from their Taiwan plant to their U.S. facility. On the way, the price somehow jumps from say $12/item to $50/item, with the $38 profit taken in Taiwan, where taxes are minimal - at least if you bribe the right people. Note that the two operations are two separate companies, which just happen to have the same family in charge, and just happen to use my text, photos, web designs and graphics for brochures, flyers, posters, CES displays, etc.

Then the item price is set to undercut any American competition just enough to eventually put the American manufacturer, who has to pay U.S. taxes, out of business. Which is why there ARE NO American manufacturers any more in entire industries. Meanwhile, the Chinese companies registered as American companies adjust salaries for management, etc., so as to ensure that they make minimal profit here, thereby getting them free access to all the U.S. infrastructure which is being paid for by their U.S. competitors.

Of course, China is starting to run into a fundamental shortfall. They had a LOT of cheap labor after the communists wrecked the economy for two generations. Now they are actually running out of people to work for $2 per day. Company reps are out scouring the countryside, trying to lure older Chinese from the villages to the city sweatshops.

Eventually, ceteris paribus, this would result in a competition in wages and work conditions, etc. However, that would make the artificially low ratio of the Yuan to the dollar/euro/etc. impossible to sustain, and then the Amazonian flood of bribes and graft which has kept the Chinese ruling elite happy will wither away, and the people in the countryside as well as the sweatshop employees will find that their Yuan's, while worth more on the international market, will not buy them enough to eat.

At which point, China will descend into civil war, with no clear answers - but lots and lots of blame - on any and all sides.

Prior to which, in order to keep the masses diverted, we may well see aggressive moves, including a possible invasion of China's "renegade province" (which has never been part of China historically, BTW, except for a few years when the empire ruled it.) Taiwan, or perhaps a stand-off with Japan over some disputed island or fishing rights. Anything to take the people's attention off the real problems.

Or, as appears to be happening, China will find other sources of dirt-cheap labor - as in Africa. Working Africans for a few dollars a week in basket case fellow "Marxist" countries like Zimbabwe could buy a few years for China before things really hit the fan. Never mind that the workers there will effectively be slaves who are simply worked to death.

And the U.S. will be too tied up with other troubles - largely self-generated - to play any role, even if it saw a direct interest in doing so. After Afghanistan, Iraq, the general Middle East powder keg and especially Iran, then there is all the hurt that Hugo Chavez is going to likely inflict upon the entirety of Central and South America. Nobody is going to be paying special attention to Africa when the wolves are at our door.

Or, some smart Chinese person could come up with an out-of-the-box solution. I suspect that it would have to be a grass-roots, bottom-up solution, as the ruling Party elite are not likely to do it.

Post 47

Sunday, February 25, 2007 - 6:34pm

Mr Osborn,

I have a little sympathy for you in so far as your broad attacks on Chinese culture. But most of your criticisms apply to just about any mono-ethnical culture as that of the Han Chinese. The Castillians, the Irish, the Russians and so on are or were all just as racist and irrational as you claim the Chinese to be now. I am Russian on my Mother's side, Irish and Danish on my Father's. (I tend to be proud of the Danes.) At a family gathering I noted how the worst immigrants in NYC to ddeal with are the Russians and the Irish, both of whom seem to go out of their way to lie whenever possible, about everything, whatever possible. I have even had to deny my employer's service to such people when, although I could see from their credit applicationbs that they were not a risk, they chose to lie to me about even that little information I had on them. Then my Brother-in-law said, well, at least your aren't dealing with the Chinese. He claims their culture has no sense of honor, just face, and that he would expect to be knifed in the back by any of his Chinese co-workers, if it was in their short term benefit. He makes this statement not in hatred of Chinese, per se, but only in comparison to other immigrant groups.

Now I tend to discount such judgements, and try to approach every new person with the benefit of the doubt. I have only known one Chinese person intimately, a Graduate Student who was at Rutgers during Tiananmen. He was quite decent and trustworthy, more decent than just about any person I knew at Rutgers at that time.

I find your attacks to be just a little to broad and sloppy to take seriously, even though I would be happy to entertain criticisms of cultural matters, if not of people treated as stereotypes. One problem I had was your seeming conflation of the Mandarin bureaucratic system in China (which presumably doesn't continue as such under the communists?) and what is called the Mandarin dialect of Chinese. That dialect, since it was the dominant one, came to be called Mandarin by westerners, but this is not the case in China itself, and there is no nefarious Confucionist program going on behind the use of this language. One might as well dismiss Latin as a Jesuit plot, or attack Langue d'Oil French as being the language of the French court.

As for racism in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, seen any Bugs Bunny cartoons lately?

Ted Keer

Post 48

Sunday, February 25, 2007 - 7:02pm

And if Bugs Bunny is too far back for Western racism in film, consider the strangely Oriental sounding members of the "Trade Federation" of Star Wars and the Jewish "Ferengi" of Star Trek.

Post 49

Monday, February 26, 2007 - 8:16pm

Ted:

Thanks for your input. I want to assure you and any other readers here who may have come to the assumption that I was anti-Chinese that this is far from the case. I AM anti-typical Chinese business and political culture, in-as-much-as it has a well-justified lousy reputation. I have generally gotten along fine with my Chinese co-workers.

On a one-to-one basis, when power relationships are not involved, many, probably most, Chinese people can be quite delightful companions or co-workers, based on my years of interaction with a fairly large sampling. The problems occur when power is involved.

As I stated earlier on in this thread, the great advantage that the West has enjoyed has come from having early on embedded the concept of a single objectively knowable reality in its collective psyche. The West has learned, by fits and starts, to subsume power under reason.

I have seen some real attrocities in terms of mis-management by non-Chinese in positions of power. There are plenty of bad and good people of all ethnicities. The problem is that the Chinese - and many other non-Western cultures - do not have a rational model to go by. It simply is not part of their culture. Thus, when they get into positions of power, you see "face" becoming paramount in the case of the typical Chinese businessman or bureaucrat, and realism taking a far back seat to it.

Because the maintenance of "face" - a self-image based on fantasy or reality that is publically accepted - is felt to be of paramount importance, it becomes critical to control information, lest criticism or deviations from the public image undermine that "face." The continuous effort to control information becomes an end in itself, and so you see the absurdities of which I have written re my workplace.

Here's another one: I create and maintain the huge company website - 1500+ pages of product information pages, with tens of thousands of internal links, all hand-coded by me. No one else is involved in the website maintenance. All the custom features, such as the ultra-fast search system, were of my design - although typically derived from code on public sources, such as http://javascript.internet.com/.

Now guess who is the one person in the company who is not allowed internet access on his or her computer?

Right. I have to wait until someone else is not using another machine in order to check the actual website on the net. Meanwhile, as I develop the site pages, I upload them, not to the internet, but to the Number One Son's computer, where they may sit for a month until he gets around to uploading them to the actual website.

Usually, when I do go to the site on the web, I find glitches, things that didn't upload, broken links, things that worked fine on my machine with my versions of the various browsers, etc. He rarely checks the upload for completeness. However, if anyone else in management finds a broken link, etc., you can guess who will be blamed!

My internet manuals are from the '90's and I am not allowed to bring in my own resources, so the only way I can get the information to keep the site updated to current standards - the DOM, the latest JavaScript tech, etc. - is to get online and ask questions of the various net gurus on the development sites. However, that access is so restricted that I have virtually given up of late.

Every employee is treated similarly. Knowledge is power. Power is a finite pie. If you have a bigger slice, then someone else has a smaller one. Thus, whenever I try to maintain an archive of the hundreds of flyers, ads, brochures, etc., that I produce, invariably one fine day I will find that management has swooped in and siezed the archive, typically tossing it in the trash, thus reducing my power and thereby increasing theirs.

Of the hundreds of ads I have created over 16 years, I have seen perhaps 2% of the actual printed ad. I.e., feedback is not considered a part of the Chinese knowledge model. To ensure that color, fonts, etc., will print correctly, I desperately Need to see the actual printed ads in order to correct any formatting problems that I might not discover on my computer with its Stylus printer. However, that would not fit the top-down model of knowledge of the Chinese business culture.

Post 50

Tuesday, February 27, 2007 - 6:49pm

Phil,

Most of what you have said about your work environment appplies quite well to privately held companies where the owner is the boss and he has issues with criticism. I worked for a small publishing company in the nineties where I ran the classified ad department. I doubled revenue in one year, and so the boss actually came and told me that since we were printing more ads, and ads use up space, he would have to cut my commission because of the added cost. If this were true, we would have been better of with no advertisements at all...

I recommended a well qualified friend of mine for a position there. I said he was a friend. They said they had decided not to hire anyone. Then the boss hired someone he met at a singles bar, who never showed up for work once, but was on the payroll, and who called in after a week with a "broken hip."

The guy hired to replace him made accusations of sexual harrassment to the boss, got transfered into a different department, with a big raise. When the people in that department found out he was making more than they were, when he could not perform his duties, they protested, and two out of three quit.

That company is out of business. I am not all that sure that your work experience is necessarily related to the fact that they owners are Chinese. There are plenty of idiots to go around.

Post 51

Tuesday, February 27, 2007 - 7:53pm

I think that I stated as much - enuf idiots to go around. I watched Kahan & Lessin, the largest health food warehouse on the West Coast in the '70's thru the mid-'80's, self-destruct due to incredibly incompetant management.

You can judge the overall quality of management here in the U.S. by the success of MicroSoft. Managers chose IBM in the early '80's because "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM," which was an actual marketing slogan of IBM, BTW.

Buying IBM PCs or compatibles pretty much locked them into MicroSoft, whose off-the-shelf, partially finished, 16-bit version of CP/M, that is to say - MS/DOS, was one of the clunkiest, most poorly designed and limited OS's on the market. But it had "IBM" stuck to it. They - IBM and MicroSoft were the last to support large memory demands, such as for graphics, the last to support multimedia in general, and the last to add a GUI (Graphical User Interface), but they had sold the business managers on the idea that risk aversion was paramount.

And of course along the way, when the real computers were well on the way to eating their lunch, circa 1986, they convinced Reagan that the Japanese were going to take over the world via "dumping" cheap memory chips into the market, leading to that great free market politician (I'm being sarcastic, in case you missed it) declaring an embargo on those chips that the Amiga, Macs, Atari STs and other competitors desperately needed to run their graphics and multimedia.

So, we coulda had Macs running everything. Almost everyone agrees that the Mac is and was better. Or we coulda had Amigas, which were 10 to 15 years ahead of everyone else, and sold about 10 million computers before their idiotic management, who knew NOTHING about computers, deliberately tanked the company to make a killing on shorting it - or so is my take on the matter.

We coulda had SUPER Macs, with Gasse's Be OS, but Microsoft knew that BeOS would blow them completely out of the water, and they wanted Apple to be the quaint little yuppie computer company that would stand as testimony that they didn't have an ill-gotten monopoly - not REAL competition, fer God's sake! So they bribed Apple and convinced the suits to bring in Jobs, with his 1980's NEXT OS - which was STILL way ahead of the best that MicroSoft could do, but not good enough to force businesses to switch.

Figure a trillion dollars lost just to MicroSoft.

There's a theory called "perfect competition" that a lot of people seem to implicitly believe in. Doctrinaire libertarians can be heard telling someone who is proposing some product or service, "Well, if it's any good, the Market Will Decide." Imagine if Henry Ford had listened to that advice.

If memory serves, this "perfect competition" fallacy was covered somewhere in the Ayn Rand Newsletter, perhaps elsewhere in the Objectivist literature. The reality is that there is a HUGE amount of slop in the market system. Companies can survive by doing just one or two things right, while committing mind-boggling goofs right and left. We humans are just really good at getting things done. We have TONS of extra capacity.

Meanwhile, we graduate MBAs who think that having their degree qualifies them to run Pepsi or Apple with equal efficacy - and we saw where that got Apple, didn't we? More money can be made by the wheelers and dealers by running up stock prices and then bailing, or manipulating markets a la ENRON, than by honest productivity - another artifact of our corporate fascist system.

So, I choose China as a target because my interest is in examining all the fallacies of management, and they seem to offer a wealth of really great examples. Western businesses tend to self-correct, so you don't see the really outrageous irrationality every single day as I do. I could look at the real basket cases, like Nigeria, where the head of the Nigerian National Bank advised investers not to invest in Nigeria, but there is little to be learned when things are that far gone.

China is perfect for my purposes - for the book I'm writing on management - because it has the resources and tech savvy to compete with anyone, but keeps tripping itself up on its failure to be self-critical. Errors of judgment often never get corrected and one gets to see them run their full course in a way that is rare in the U.S.

I truly hope that Rand's works will make it bigtime in China and have a positive impact on correcting these endemic faults before China runs out of steam. We could really use a Chinese John Galt right about now.

In the past, China has gone through repeated cycles of invasion, empire, corruption, reinvasion, new empire, new corruption sapping it from within, etc. Now it appears that we may be seeing that cycle running in overdrive. When a system with such a high level of corruption runs out of victims - the hundreds of millions of dirt-poor Chinese who have sustained those 99-cent-store bargains here at $2 a day, it typically starts eating itself - or attacking its neighbors.

This time there is no barbarian horde waiting outside the great wall. Any enemy will have to be manufactured, which is why I fear for Japan. China cannot take on the U.S., or Europe, or Russia militarily, as it is still completely outclassed. But, Japan and Taiwan are nearby, with relatively small militaries and no nukes (that we know of...).

Given the informational flaws in Chinese culture, it is all too likely that an error of judgement, such as the idea that the U.S. would allow China to invade Taiwan, could be sustained and lead to disaster. This gives me a very selfish reason to especially focus on China, as I don't want to be here on the day that China is turned into a radioactive desert.

Not only do the winds carry pollution here now quite effectively from the Chinese coal plants, but also I am sure that enough missiles would be targetted on Los Angeles that a few would get through, even if the anti-missiles actually work. Even one nuclear explosion in the neighborhood makes for a very bad day. It really bothers me to hear Pentagon generals and analysts saying that we will be fighting China in a decade or two - if not sooner.

And, believe it or not, I really, truly want China to be rich, happy and free. Note that people who don't care about you will not bother to criticize.

Post 52

Tuesday, February 27, 2007 - 10:43pm

In Response to Chris Baker's Post 30

Chris had previously argued that copyright should end at death.

"The purpose is to reward the author, not heir or hangers on."

Then your problem is not with copyright, but with inheritence law and the fact that people put up with golddiggers? Knowing that my designated inheritors will benefit is a reward to me.

Chris mentions that various works such as Aristotle and Mark Twain stay in print, even the the original source is no longer protected. This works fine in the case of classical works of proven value, and for this reason, I, like you support a timelimit. You simply make the cut-off death, while I would make it based on length in print. But even in Aristotle's case, the work is usually updated, given in a new translation, and therefore can come back under protection.

Chris: "A copyright is not a tangible thing. Tangible things are a car, a house, a share of Exxon stock, or an ounce of gold."

A share of stock is not a tangible thing, the certificate representing it miht be, but the share and the certificate are two separate things.

"A copyright is a contract between a person and a government."

The government does not contract with private citizens, except in cases where it is acting in some other capacity, such as the owner of a property or the in the procuremnt of weapons. Wars, laws, trials, and elections are inherently governmental, but are in no way contractual.

"The author does not benefit in any way from having the copyright outlive him by even a single day."

First, even if copyright were a contract, contracts do not necessarily become null and void upon the death of one party. Second, as I said before, it is a benefit to me now to know that my inheritors will profit from my work after my death. I could even name the US treasury a beneficiary. But the book's profits and my royalties are two separate things. Even if I am a nihilistic misanthrope who hopes the world will end the day I die, that regards my royalties. The profits belong to the investors who are still alive.

It sounds like you learned economics from marxist anarchists?

Ted

Post 53

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - 3:55am

it is a benefit to me now to know that my inheritors will profit from my work

That, however, is not a validation, merely a sentiment.

Post 54

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - 7:28am

If a person generates a body of work motivated by leaving an inheritance to his family or whoever that is validation enough. How is it different than buying life insurance? Would insurance companies be able to argue they need not pay off on claims because the purchaser of the account is dead? If "intellectual property" is indeed "property" it should enjoy the right of inheritance like other property.

Post 55

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - 10:16am

Phil,

Your anti-Microsoft rant just went too far. As far as I have been able to tell this company is an honest, American success story, that gets attacked visciously for reasons that don't hold up. They have been the victim of governmental abuse under anti-trust legislation, not protected by our government while foriegn governments looted them and have been blamed for not writing software differently - as if that were a moral offense.

You can judge the overall quality of management here in the U.S. by the success of MicroSoft. Managers chose IBM in the early '80's because "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM,"

In that statement you knock management of companies across America for buying IBM. Then because IBM was running Microsoft software the purchasing companies were idiots. The truth is people purchased a trusted name (IBM) because the PC was a brand new invention and all the hundreds of little companies that sprung up like mushrooms after the rain weren't able to deliver or maintain. Later when the PC had been around for a few years companies contracted with clone makers or less expensive 'name' manufacturers. They stayed with the Microsoft/Intel platform because it was the most cost-effective solution.

You attack Microsoft for creating MS/DOS out of CP/M as if this were a moral failing equivalent to terrorism. Get over it. Because of Gates' good business sense, persistence and vision we now have a standard that works. I like Windows XP - so shoot me. I also think that Visual Studio is the finest software development platform I've seen. The computer industry's history is rich in boy geniuses that found out it takes more than a good technical idea to become a success and stay a success. But lots of people keep crying that they don't want to accept that reality.

"...we coulda had Macs running everything...We coulda had SUPER Macs...we coulda had Amigas"

What we have is what we bought. Micosoft's crime was to offer the marketplace something closer to what the marketplace wanted than anyone else. In that volital market, companies came and went very quickly - that Microsoft lasted this long is testament to what they did right.

"...they wanted Apple to be the quaint little yuppie computer company that would stand as testimony that they didn't have an ill-gotten monopoly...So they bribed Apple to bring in Jobs..."

As an Objectivist you should know that Microsoft isn't and couldn't be a monopoly. Steve Jobs is the one who has pulled Apple's chestnuts out of the fire both times they've nearly tanked. Claiming Microsoft bribed Apple is nonsense on the level of conspiracy-nut-theory.

Post 56

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - 11:52am

What Mike Ericson said in response to Robert Malcom said!

And I own a Mac.

Microsoft has not even reached the quality of my old 1988 Macintosh, conspircay theories or not. Their position, like that of the qwerty keyboard format, is due to inertia, and nothing more.

When we once had a meeting at work, where we were asked how to make the company run better, I said plan for a year and then shut down entirely for a month and restart from scratch. My managers absolutely love me.

Ted

Post 57

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - 1:45pm

It is an important consideration to know if a company will be around. Back when the new high-speed internet companies were popping up all over, I think I tried one or two that had great speed and low cost. However, they went bankrupt and no more internet. Now what? Have to try finding someone else - hopefully someone who will stick around. Same thing was happening with PCs. Also, while I liked the Mac, I was always able to tweak and fix my PC and upgrade and change parts on it and the Mac was very integrated and more like a "black box" if it broke - hardware or software - and you could not figure out what to do to fix the damn thing.

Post 58

Thursday, March 1, 2007 - 7:13pm

There are still things that I could do easily on my Amigas that I can't do on my Windose PC (Piece of Crap) at work. Just one example: the Amiga had a simple command called "ASSIGN." It allowed you to designate any device as a part of a "logical device." So, you get a file with fonts on a floppy, working with it, you use some fonts from a CD subdirectory, and then there are the fonts in your original fonts directory. Instead of having to copy fonts all to one directory, you would just ASSIGN the various directories to fonts:, either on the fly or in your startup file. Then, the whole OS would treat the logical directory just like a real device.

At work, one of the hardest things to maintain is all the links to files in the various large documents I produce. I frequently have to run a system search to find a file and then relink it and a dozen more into a document. It would be so nice to have the Amiga's ASSIGN command.

I recall when I was consulting with OC schools in the mid-'80's. Apple had convinced virtually every teacher in the country that the Apple II was the ultimate educational computer. This is called conning an ignorant market. You put your money into marketing, not into product quality, and depend upon the market ignorance to make it work.

A lot of schools got their one free Apple II (subsidized via tax write-offs) and then bought a few more and then a whole lab, and an Apple certified instructor, and then had to drag most of the kids into the computer lab, because the Apple II was the clunkiest of the 8-bit machines and cost roughly three times as much to boot. The kids had Commodore 64's or Atari 800's at home, which had just about everything that the Apple II had, except for the expansion slots inside, which were rarely used. Somehow, they and their parents learned how to operate and program the C64 simply by reading a manual in a few hours, while it took a college semester to teach the teachers how to use the Apple II.

But my competition was a guy that - according to the OC Register, which reported on him - drove his BMW to schools, wearing his immaculate suit, gives the purchasing director a free Apple II and some free software, and so they would end up with 1/3 of the computers they could've had, machines which were far harder to use, and incompatible with what most of the kids had at home.

When the Amiga came along, the local OC School Board issued an edict forbidding schools from purchasing anything but Apple or PC compatible. Of course the Amiga could run a fairly nice PC software emulator, as well as a Mac emulator that was faster than the Mac itself, as well as UNIX and BSD (think Linux), and an Atari ST emulation, which you might think would qualify as "compatible." Nope. I was told that IBM or MicroSoft and Apple had come to some sort of agreement to push for excluding the Amiga and ST and were busy promoting this in the name of efficiency to school boards around the county.

While the schools were buying Apple IIs in the late '80's right up into the early '90's, when they could've bought an Amiga for the same price with over 100 times the computing horsepower and a fully modern multi-tasking OS, Lawrence Livermore labs was buying hundreds of Amigas. The Amiga's multitasking allowed it to transparently interface with their mainframes and reduce the bandwidth and processing load enormously for their researchers.

I had NO problem moving to the PC from the Amiga when I started my current job in 1991. It was just very boring and slow and incredibly stupid. PC DOS had a fraction of the Amiga DOS versatility and power, there was no interprocess control language on the PC, the graphic capabilities were closer to the C64 than the Amiga, there was no music or speech emulator on-board, the machine crashed or corrupted files all the time, etc., etc. It was a PC. The DOS commands worked pretty much the same way - just with one-tenth of the options. The mouse worked the same, just a lot less precise, and you had to stop everything when you printed or formatted a floppy on the PC, whereas on the Amiga, you would scarcely notice it.

(The funny thing is that my Win2K Pro 2GigHz 2GigRam system at work STILL can't spool to the printer - or format a floppy, if I was still doing that - without slowing d..o.....w.....n. You would think that a company like MicroSoft would have figured out real multi-tasking by now.)

How a company, whether MicroSloth or Francon Architectural Design, manages to pawn off junk and drive top-notch products like the Amiga or Howard Roark out of the market is an interesting issue.

I will say this for IBM. They learned from their experience with MicroSoft. And they had the integrity to cut their ties, turn around and take MicroSoft on with OS/2 Warp, which was a LOT better than Windows, although nowhere as good as Gasse's BeOS. However, too many people had gone to our public schools, or something, and any demand for excellence was far overshadowed by the herd mentality, the fear of being an individual.

Post 59

Thursday, March 1, 2007 - 7:31pm